I work part-time in a Factory in Berlin, on a traditional assembly-line. Its 12hours shifts so i thought there would be plenty of time to think about what occurs according to Marx’s theory of value. Although the occassional mental reliefs when one can gasp at the theoretical implications of work were rare. So i sought mental relief not in a theorized rationalization but in reflections on the concrete activities of working and farting (or rather the burned sulfur smell on the assembly line), through a Benjaminian ‘Profane Illumination’

Marx writes of work: ‘He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. (Capital Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value)

This was quite obvious when subjected to traditional disciplnary assembly-line procedure. It is an insight that doesnt emerge in service-jobs where your communicative personality is subsumed into some sort of production process, since the labour-activity is expirienced as an authentic ‘being yourself’, like a bartender or something. Although the line is thin, call center jobs involve an equal mechanization of bodies, minds and voices. Alienation it seems should be a self-evident concept, but i suppose its out of fashion since yuppie/media jobs involve now some sort of project of self-realization, of the pursuing of the prescribed inner purpose, like being a creative and autonmous market actor.

Im posted at the sulfur-section of the solar panel assembly line. A group of 3 workers waits every 5 minues for a box containing the panel-to-be to come out of an oven onto a portable conveyor belt, that looks like a foosball table. Someone weighs a few grams of Sulfur, which are distributed on the side of the box that will contain the next unprocessed panel that will be inserted in at the front of the conveyor belt oven. A second worker takes the hot panel, where the sulfur has been burnt onto to the next station in the assembly line. I was mostly unscrewing and screwing the bolts of the box after the processed panel had been replaced by a new one to be inserted into the front.

I made some jokes to entertain during the occasional free minute. But i aimed to deploy a humour that employs its immediate surroundings, that designtes the immediate symbolic surroundings through their materiality. This strategy emerged, as a counter to the jokes of another worker, who put a piece of black tape on his upper lip and did the hitler things. I also passed through a stage of conservative joking. There was an air-brush to blow away dust, and while waiting i used it to fan my sweaty forehead and made the same joke “Im in a convertible car, or on the Titanic”. This joke like the Hitler makes external references and introduces them to the immediate surroundings, but doesnt challenge them, they are just a prop like the square bit of black tape to put on your face. Its an escapist joke, wishing to be somewhere else, more bourgeois (The joke wouldnt work as an escapist relief i had said “Im in a hurricane”)

A subverisive joke would have as its butt the concrete, or more specifically the arbitraryness and fragility of what we assume to be the concrete. A made a fart joke that brought in the materiality of the situation, not of the general economic materiality, which people there were quite aware of, but of what we were up to. When the boxes were opened for the processed panel to be taken to the next stage, there was sometimes still a wiff of the burned sulfur, so i said “Either someone farted or someone has been burning sulfur nearby”. The fart is just a signalling to the joke and its butt, because if someone had actually farted it would be embarassing rather than funny. If the joke had just been “Did someone fart” it would have been incomplete, what was added was the concrete dimension, the literal incorporation of the surroundings: that we were burning sulfur. The comic signalling of the fart allowed a suspension of what we were seamlessly and continually doing. It brought to display our material surroundings, momentarily bringing the activity of burning sulfur into a fragility. This seemed clear since one of the workers quickly responded in a serious tone “No, the smell comes from the burned sulfur in the box”, in order to performatively reassert the taken for grantedness and self-evidentness of our material undertaking, in order to pull back the symbolically suspended material process of the assembly line that was the butt of the fart joke.

Might a Fart be something subversive (if we read it into “bodily collective innervation” and “revolutionary discharge”)
“The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto”” (Walter Benjamin – Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia)

I have a Marxist Fart-Joke: What does one do when “all that is solid melts into air”?

Andy Bichelbaum from the Yes Men was in Berlin for a workshop, where he discussed with activists their plans for actions in a YesMen tradition. In the evening we went to see his new movie ‘The Yes Men Fix the world” and here are a few thought about their strategy.

This is fantastic, spoiling the glamour of the red carpet and shifting the spectators gaze onto the rotten core of the glamourous spectacle, bringing into focus the absuridity of the festivity and its pomp.

The YesMen exemplified this intrusion and subtraction well that i talked about in my previous post on the G20 protest. Their innovative strategy is revealed when their at their comic best, when they play the corportate exaggerations (like WTO representative, McDonals, Halliburton and the Survivaballs), rather than in their simulation of Corporate Social Responsbility (like Hurricane Kathrina or the infamous 300 million viewed Union Carbide Bhopal disaster intervention, that is when they’re strategy is “identity-correction”, where they demask and denounce the individual corporations negligence, putting up logos of corporations and personifying the cause of troubles). In these latter Corporate Social Responsibility stunts, the aim is somekind of positive project, an alternative agenda/possibility. In the first variation of YesMen stunts, exaggeration and grotesqueness’ are the main techniques. I think they differ from Billionares for Bush and the like, because they go through the process of intrusion and therefore undertake the work of breaking the binary to get at that non-binaric stance momentarily reached by the subtraction. For Example when you see those security / weapons manufacturers ask questions about how the new Halliburton Survivaball suite could withstand biological attacks then you witness their state of being duped of their dupidity, which shows how the whole weapons industry depends on the nodding support and forced awe and applause directed at positions of power (also in the classic WTO example of the yesmen, where people still clap at the end). Somehow the systems symbolic power is revealed, to the viewer, or the non-dimwitted. But it seems its not so much a matter of wit, as the fact of not being materially immersed in the structuring envirments that ritually calls for your mental and bodily obidience to those with the sceptre and crown. But by switching these insignias of power in the immersed environment (the survivaballs at the Conference-Hall for Corporates listening to the hotshots) they reveal the relations which sustain the corporate fests. As with the survivorballs suits when the crash the BMW gala in Berlin (the video above), the grotesqueness of the gowns and all those bodies dressed in suits is amplified.

So the intrusion is the mimicking /performing of the e.g. Corporate-Capitalist symbolic identity, but the attendees dont notice these impersonations, for them it would be ‘buisness as usual’”. This is more destabalizing than ‘denouncing’, since it allowes a momentary burst of laughter, an incredulity and anxiety that contains an awareness of the fragility and arbitraryness of the Symbolically based mechanism of corportate power.

(Ill try to post radical jokes at the end of each post)
Stephen Colbert – what happens if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it – then my illegal logging buisness is succeeding

by David Graeber
It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won’t make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France. (In fact, it would probably work just to convince a substantial portion of the French civil service and military.)
This is the essence of politics. Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. No king would openly admit he is king just because people think he is. Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one’s power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one’s power has some basis other than their recognition. That basis may be almost anything—
divine grace, character, genealogy, national destiny. But “make me your leader because if you do, I will be your leader” is not in itself a particularly compelling argument.

In this sense politics is very similar to magic, which in most times and places—as I discovered in Madagascar—is simultaneously recognized as something that works because people believe that it works; but also, that only works because people do not believe it works only because people believe it works. For this why magic, whether in ancient Thessaly or the contemporary Trobriand Islands, always seems to dwell in an uncertain territory somewhere between poetic expression and outright fraud. And of course the same can usually be said of politics”

This is why Lacan famously stated that the madman, who thinks that he is a king, is no crazier than the king, who thinks that he is a king. In as far as the king identifies with his symbolic mandate to such a degree that he doesn’t see that that is all it is, or in other words: in as far as he believes that there is no difference between his position of enunciation and the content of what he is (described as), he is as crazy as the madman. Another Lacanian paraphrase of the cogito could thus be: “I don’t think, therefore I am (the king).”

Events at the G20 protest in London simulate the possibilities of violence as an activist strategy that can step out of the trappings and co-optations of the binaries set up by the media-police. How can the symbolic mechanisms that prop up a hegemonic order be effaced? A partial, potential strategy is not one of opposition and realizable violence, but of and through intrusion and subtraction, which has the effect (not for the dim-witted) of defacing the symbolic order on which capitalists social power bases itself. It is a subtractive comic stance from which an impossible violence can be waged.A suspiciously hip protester

One of the pictures on the Guardians G20 gallery shows a suspiciously, rather hip protester in the act of hurling a monitor into the already broken RBS branch . Surrounding him is an amphitheater of journalists, lined up with cameras held over their heads, their clicking drowning out the sound of glass breaking, as Charlie Brooker noted in his newswipe. It seems that every newspaper send a cameraman, or all the freelance photographers of London were seeking out the money-shot of a masked protester breaking property defended by the law. This fixation on violence fixes the protesting on the street and co-opts it as a binaric oposite to the liberal-pacificst Order. This narrow inter-play precludes violence in its symbolic dimension. The images of skirmishes only include violence as grievous bodily harm or assaults on property: “Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of “violence”: something like ‘damage to persons or property not authorized by properly constituted authorities’. This has the effect that if even one protestor damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests”, but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent.” (Graeber – Giant Puppets). Street Violence is condemned and easily neutralized by police violence in return.

Although this problem emerges from the strategy of the protesters on the frontline too. Their violence is a realizable violence, hurling a stone at the police or smashing a window, which folds into and reinforces the police-state’s representation of protest. The ‘Reclaim the Streets’ slogans are repetitive, predictable & waning. They are slogans of territorial occupation and usurpation “Whose streets, our streets”, which operate only in their immediate spatiality, and operate with an idea of politics as presence & declarations & as acts of reclaiming. This demarcation of the sphere of political action as delineated by the slogans during the protests, leads to a closure of reference points for attacks. They’re hysterically shouted at the police men, and are futile in a historical and strategic sense. The Big Other does not hear them. What message can assault and suspend it then?

Realizable violence, completely misses the target, if the target is the symbolic order that attempts to structure our perceptions of hegemonic categories as stable. The Red Army Faction apparently indulged in some exploratory torture of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former SS officer and industrialist. In this situation of carnal vulnerability, or on a much larger scale the Khmer Rouge, it is clear the bourgeois cannot be killed. To ordinarily perceive capitalism as a property of things or of people in themselves misses the, in rather spooky terms, the supersensous phantasmogoric ectoplasm, on which the machinations of the capitalist economy operate. In Marx’s terms these are the social relation of production which is the abstract couplet of concrete activities within capitalism. To start targeting the former, if it can make sense, an apt strategy, or its secondary effects, would move beyond only honing in on the identities emerging from alienation that political economy masks us with: ‘the capitalist’the worker’ ‘the consumer’. More or less one can’t “Smash Capitalism” or its incarnated agents as another slogan exclaims. To get to the point, and to sharpen our target, we can even quote from the Communist Manifesto “To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production…Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.”

The long tradition of rioting and storming contained in it a momentum for an actualisable, realizable violent usurpation and infliction of bodily pain, which as strategy here in Europe is rather passe’. A subversive strategy in the space of the streets could be performed as an “impossible violence” that can therefore exceed the confines of momentary acts of realizable violence and affronts the socio-symbolic underpinnings that enable the power of the ruling classes to flow. Of course money and the police are the pillars of bourgeois-bureaucratic rule. But this monetary-military power, that compels workers to work for them and forces dissenters into their police vans is the acknowledged basis of their power. The ruling classes have the monopoly, both monetary and in the use of physical violence. A critique that reveals this as the source of their power (like the themes of inequality, billionaires and police-repression highlighted by demonstrators) seems to misfire, since they and everybody else knows this very well. Even the ideological legitimacy of their bourgeois values comes from this: the wealthy classes are responsible for prosperity, and the big-spending state for protecting property.

The anarchist Anthropologist, David Graeber, makes a distinction between social power based on the ability to act directly on others, and the power arising from the ability to define oneself which can convince others how they should act towards you. The first is rooted in money, or to be more inclusive in capitalist-bureaucratic (or monetary-military) monopolizations of weapons of coercion. The second has its centrifugal core in their social status of production from which spin and spew out their symbolic power. This power is based on insignia, symbolic codes that structure our perception of them, and signal us to act with deference and respect. Even in our binary opposition and critiques, in which the contours of their power are retraced, we acknowledge and reproduce its format and therefore contribute to its stability. An opposition that sustains its enemy, as a sinister conspiratorial figure, and by erecting itself as the opposition, allows the enemy, through the media, the conditions for its own legitimation, securing law and order and wealth production, as opposed to “unproductive rioting”. To deface the character masks of capitalism, a strategy that can tear the symbolic identities of their social status (the Banker, the Politician) could be attenuated by a comical analytical stance that intimates their spectrally objective underpinnings. For example:

Chris Night, the Communist Anthropologist at the University of East London, who let it slip that he might accidentally hang a banker, or start gnawing at a bankers leg rather than get a sandwich if he gets a little bit peckish ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/31/g20-protests-chris-knight ) exemplifies this effect emerging through impossible Violence. It remains outside the trappings of the binaries of the media-police (atleast for the viewer since the media took it literally… that he was actually planning to hang a banker, grab a person in a suite coming out of the office, and throw a rope over the nearest lamppost, while the 5000 police people stand by) but is still present on the streets and in streams of dissemination.

A symbolic attack of impossible violence can step-over the cordon of bashing police men. An impossible violence, is so grotesquely overdrawn that it permeates out of the binaries of street-skirmishes & the media, into the symbolic order, such as into the figure of the overlord banker. So Chris Knights ‘threat’ to gnaw at a bankers leg when he gets hungry, is subversive because it is an image that crawls its way into the category, and gnaws at it. The humorous rather than the violent element is responsible for dividing the image of the unitary power of finance, for inserting a space of critical reflection. It has an undermining presence, dislocating the position of the banker and forcing it into a more vulnerable positions, where it can be mocked, and in a first maneuver exposed for their petty materiality as embodied in the fleshy leg or dismembered bloody hand at the end end of a pin-stripe sleeve, that Chris Knight’s “Festival of the Dead” Procession costumes contained. Since it is a symbolic assault that splits the categories of mastery in the Symbolic Order, by lodging itself within, it remains after the protest, humorously clinging onto the figure of the banker, constantly revealing its vulnerability by having effaced the confident strut of the baron. But it is in the second maneuver where a further, secondary effect can be found in this strategy of subversive humour. This effect goes beyond revealing the bankers petty bodies, beyond the simple intrusion of corporeal or economic material reality. This strategy is not a blockade, an autonomous alternative space or a physical attack that can hinder capitalist spurts. By ‘allowing’ the capitalist to continue, this strategy can merely suggest the mechanisms of its reproduction, by revealing how the bankers continue to strut in the pace of their supremacy after having been symbolically tripped by their defacement (see ‘the universal-at-work chapter in Zupancic, 2008). The Guardian reported on some personal testimony of a few bankers: “The riots, they said, were only a minor inconvenience: “We’ve been in this morning, made a lot of money and now are chilling out”” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/bankers-betting-protesters-g20).
This is what is actually funny, that after the pompous baron slips on the banana peel he is up again and walking around arrogantly, firm in “the belief of his own aristocratic Self” (Zupancic: 29-30)
“The process of joking is not only “work done with the help of the Symbolic” (condensations, displacements, playing with homonyms, and so on) but always also something that displays the “Symbolic at work” (Zupancic; 143). A bad example, from the placards at the protest “Banker rhymes with…?”. There could be better ones.

From Chris Knights performative strategy can be intimiated that the source of their efficiency exceeds their material presence, such as the banter of bankers about poker-nights and stocks over a starbucks coffee. This is revealed because of the comic stance this maneuver provides, whose effect is a distance, from which perspective we can witness the functioning of symbolic structures, as the absurdity of the individual banker who assumes and continually inserts him or herself into the position of an ordained invincibility. It scathes this symbolic order on which social power rests, through this subtraction (from symbolic hierarchies and binaric media representations). This stance then enables a subtraction, that like in the image Zizek used in the Conference “On the idea of Communism” consists of pulling out a a card from the house of cards, which leads to the crumbling of the whole structure, only from that distanced stance of course. This is a strategy unlike the declarations of temporary autonomous zones, that remains a green patch within the social order, that like Robert Owens utopian villages can idyllically co-exist and not fundamentally challenge the ruling symbolic order.
The question is then how to come up with tactics that efface social power, not by opposition, but by intrusion and subtraction, which has the effect (not for the dim-witted media) of delegitimisng the symbolic order on which the capitalists social power is based. Something like this seems pressing, because the uncanny, gruesome puppeteering can bind the opposites of Violence and Humour. This can side-step mediation through the news, which propagates the liberal myth of the feckless consciousless agitator, of the violent ones, the few trouble-makers who wreak havoc and ruin it for everyone else, those are the true ‘people’, who are peace-loving, and as the media reported share a joke and their organic cookies with police men. In this ideological deadlock the possibility for harming the police-state order is foreclosed.